Now the months in Finnish are named after agricultural activities or natural phenomena. Invariably, they end on kuu, the Finnish word for moon or month. For instance, now is lokakuu — mud month. Sounds a bit depressive? Just you wait, next month will be marraskuu — the month of death. (Dead leaves, dead grass, death of the year, this kind of stuff.)

In this respect, the Finnish month names are similar to the month names in many Slavic languages. (But not in Russian, which uses the same boring Latin-derived names.) To illustrate this point, I put the Latin, Finnish and Ukrainian months in the table below.

On the contrary, the Finnish names for days of the week, as well as the word for week itself (viikko), are practically wholesale nicked from a Germanic language. That’s why all of them, apart from keskiviikko (itself a calque of German Mittwoch, i.e. “middle of the week” ), end on tai rather than on päivä.